Gemma

Face a week of academic work trying to keep your well-being indicators high!

Gemma is a Role-Playing Game output of the GEMMA PROJECT, an EU project co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union (2022-1-IT02-KA220-HED-000087512).In this Serious Game you will have to impersonate a HEI (Higher Education Institution) worker and face a working week trying to preserve your well-being indicators and simultaneously maximize your work outcome. The well-being indicators considered in the game are 3: hedonic (positive feeling about oneself and life), eudemonic (psychological well-being), and social.

The academic staff in HEIs (Higher Education Institutions) typically focuses its attention to the scientific metrics, qualitative indexes regarding the publications and about the teaching. Researchers, professors, lecturers do not have a limited number of hours, their contract claims a fixed amount, but because their work is related to a full “intellectual” effort, it is spread throughout the whole day and during the bank holidays. This is even more relevant after the COVID-19 crisis that complicates this picture, increasing the difficulty to divide private life and personal life caused by telework. Besides increasing resilience and productivity, the telework could also contribute to the green transformation and help bring vulnerable groups into the economic mainstream. For this reason, it is necessary to have access to training and qualifications for all. On another side the academic staff in HEIs, from PhD students to full professors, refers to a new and dynamic world, and there is the requirement to hybridize their knowledge and bring their ideas to the market. It is even more urgent the acquisition of new skills, provoking a significant impact of their research on the outside the universities. Then, an increased number of HEIs’ researchers need to acquire entrepreneurial competences, including also digital skills for the management of the new challenges of our era; and finally, life skills to allow a good work/personal life balance. This last aspect is even more important when the researcher is called to try to invest their time also in creating new spin-offs, startups or collaborating with the companies.